Stephens' Visual Basic® Programming 24-Hour Trainer

INTRODUCTION

SO YOU WANT TO LEARN VISUAL BASIC PROGRAMMING? Excellent choice!

Visual Basic is a powerful, all-purpose programming language that enables you to build robust applications that run on the desktop or over the Web. Visual Basic provides all the tools that you need to build a huge variety of applications:

• Database applications

• Point of sales systems

• Web applications

• Two- and three-dimensional graphics programs

• Image processing and photo manipulation systems

• Computer-aided design (CAD) systems

• Document layout and printing systems

• Hardware control systems

• High-performance games

• Much, much more

Note

This book refers to Visual Basic using its full name only, but Visual Basic programmers often refer to the language as VB. You'll also often see it referred to as VB in discussions on the Internet.

Of course, there are some problems that you won't be able to solve even with Visual Basic. If you want a program that picks the winning number on a roulette wheel or that can predict stock prices, you may have better luck using tarot cards (or a degree in economics), but for tractable problems Visual Basic is a great choice.

This book is a self-paced guide to Visual Basic programming in the Visual Studio environment. It uses short, easy-to-follow lessons, reinforced by step-by-step instructions, screencasts, and supplemental exercises to help you master Visual Basic programming quickly and painlessly. It explains how to write Visual Basic programs that interact with the user to read inputs, calculate ...